What automation processes have you implemented that make your life easier?

some discord bots on a private server, notify me whenever a paper in my scientific field is published.

have another one about whenever senator or a representative trades stock.

useful.

That second one sounds neat. Could also be a great website
- there are a few already:
  https://www.opensecrets.org/
  https://www.capitoltrades.com/

I used to work at a place outside the city that only had one bus after work and it was kinda spotty and unreliable. However, there was an online API provided by the bus company that told me where the bus is.

So I wrote a Python script and a Linux alert that would give me a notification when the bus was within range, with enough time to get to the stop on time.

Can this be done for basically... any transit? How do you search for api url or stream feed? Its not anything like RSS is it?
- I found a webpage that uses it and found out that it requires no authentication. So I just copied the url and sent a request every 5 seconds just like the webpage did. It gave a csv of busses, their routes and gps locations.

A few years back me and my dad set up a raspberry pi with a temperature probe to monitor the water temp in a local swimming hole, it reports the temperature every half hour and submits it to a private webpage.

Works really well

That's a rad idea. How are you powering and communicating with it? When I hear "watering hole" I picture a secret swimming spot out in the woods somewhere.
- It run off of a 12v motorcycle battery, the whole thing is on a timer, every halfhour, the timer gives the pi power for two minutes, during those two minutes the pi boots up, and runs a bash script to collect and send the data, wait for one min and shutdown the pi.
  The pi communicates over wifi with a friendly neighbouring house.

Scheduling bill payments through my banks online bill pay. I will pay bills with a credit card when I absolutely have to. I don't use ACH autodraft at all if I can avoid it. Online bill pay is usually free, it helps centralize all my bill payments, and if there's a problem I just call the bank instead of having to mess with the vendor.

It also helps make sure I don't forget to pay a bill, which my ADHD brain would do all the time otherwise.

Automating bill payments had been such a huge change for my life - I was only sporadically able to maintain good habits but now everything just works. Minimal effort, maximum gainz!
But I’d also include
tap-to-pay means I never have to carry cash, never have to pay exhorbitant atm fees, don’t even need to carry my wallet
online payments - even people you’d normally expect to require cash, will now take Zelle or Venmo or PayPal. No cash needed. This winter I had neighborhood kids shovel driveways that took Venmo!
Square. Yes, now we can even go to festivals or farmers markets without paying ridiculous fees for cash or the risk of carrying cash. My kids scout troop was an early adopter and for several years made huge donation money as one of the few booths to take credit card.

I've been playing Factorio with a friend. Our factory was getting large enough that him downloading the map and catching up was getting really slow (even though the factory itself wasn't that big). We ended up setting up a VPN which somehow made that process SIGNIFICANTLY faster. However, I really only wanted the VPN on while we were playing the game. So I ended up writing some automation to detect if I was no longer playing and the VPN was still active and then shut it off automatically. It's a small thing but I'm both proud of it and happy with the results.

I'm processing orders for an online shop so a lot of what I do is printing different things on different printers (different labels with different sizes etc) so I wrote a few little JS scripts to inject into the Webshop to automate downloading the different labels, and an accompanying AHK script to automatically print the labels to the correct printers. Instead of 10-20 inputs I just press one button now.

Communication. Everything. With my partner.

Us both come from familys that never communicate and live without a day plan. Our life has improved so much

Breathing

Monthly backups of containers and volumes, notifications of disruptions, rules for salary to send it to the right places. Arr stack saves a ton of time too

Wxterior lights turn on and off with sunrise and set. It's been running on a raspberry pi b for ages with Misterhouse. I'd like to change it over to something newer, but I automated it because I have other things to do.

I used to download school menus and expose it to my phone as an ical feed, but no longer need that. It still runs. I should shut it off some day...

I'm really into IoT automation - wiring up Arduino & ESP devices and programming them - but tbh it's hard to think of much to automate IRL. So I haven't automated anything yet. I want a few ourdoor lights to sense motion more elaborately than just having a motion sensor built in - to light up when approached from opposite directions. Also to add switches indoors where I didn't think to put them when I wired the house. So like, have several ESP32 wall switches tell a room light to turn on or off without running new AC lines through the walls. That would be super useful. Another one is subtle night lighting on stairways for safety, so my eventual cause of death isn't falling downstairs after tripping on a cat.

Copied from the original post:

I'm a big fan of automating as much as I can.

Lights automatically turn on when someone enters the room, but only if it's dark enough to need lights in that room at that moment. Turn them off automatically when presence is no longer detected (not just IR based motion detection).
My old washer and dryer alert me when they're done thanks to vibration sensors.
Media downloads when added to a watchlist.
Regular backups locally and to the cloud.
My phone enables/disables rotation lock based on the app I'm currently using.
Phone also opens various playlists when connecting to my car stereo based on date/time.
Various "scenes" to turn devices on and off, control brightness, volume levels, etc. This includes controlling devices that are IR, RF, Bluetooth, and Zigbee based.
Game servers that update when new versions are released, but only when no players are connected. If anyone is connected, sends a message to a discord server (that is also connected to Matrix) alerting everyone to the available update and asking players to log off at their earliest convenience. Players can also check on game server status with bot commands in the game's channel on that server.

Everything runs locally and has a manual backup so I can still control everything the old fashioned way if my phone is dead or if my non tech savvy parents are over and need to operate any of it.

that make

that made.

Our foray into automation is:

meross light bulbs about 50%
maybe 4 amazon echo flex

We like that we can turn off the lights, dim them or change colour, with a request. But beyond power blinds and tile tracking and dogs and cat, our eventual switch is gonna be shallow.

I need a replacement for the Echo Flex units that'll work with HAss -- voice interaction, music and calls, etc. I'd like to AnyLocate the cats' Tiles and show where they are in the house. We run airlock protocol for the patio access to ensure that cats never get out, but confirming they're not hiding under the bed would really reduce the anxiety around that.

Seriously, I haven’t automated anything. And life is just fine.